How AI will capture UXUI and, ultimately, you and I.
May 13, 2025
By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative Director
My prophecy is that AI will not engage us with epic content and/or spectacular special effects.
Bombastic CGI, car chases, explosions, death-defying acrobatics have become too easy.
AI will make all this undistinguishable from live action.
It will render super productions obsolete and, consequentially, boring, trite.
Thing is, AI doesn’t need our attention: it already has it in its entirety.
It will operate in ever so subtle and imperceptible ways to manipulate our behavior.
The devil is in the details.
“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was to convince the world he didn’t exist.”
Which leads us to the two pivotal concepts of behavioral economics.
The ying and yang of UXUI.
“Nudge” and “sludge”*.
Let’s see how ChatGPT defines these two concepts:
Nudge:
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- Nudges are interventions designed to subtly influence behavior by making certain choices more appealing or easier, without restricting freedom of choice.
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- They leverage cognitive biases and psychological principles to guide people towards desired outcomes.
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- Examples: displaying healthier food options prominently in a cafeteria or automatically enrolling people in a retirement plan.
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- Nudges are often associated with “libertarian paternalism,” where interventions aim to improve people’s well-being without infringing on their autonomy.
Sludge:
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- Sludge, conversely, refers to interventions that intentionally create friction or barriers to make certain choices more difficult or cumbersome.
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- It can be seen as the “dark side” of nudges, where the intent is to discourage or hinder a specific behavior.
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- Examples include making subscription cancellations difficult, requiring complex procedures for rebates, or making it harder to access essential services.
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- Sludge can be used to protect the interests of organizations, even if it goes against the best interests of the individuals being targeted.
In short, nudges facilitate actions by minimizing friction, while sludges inhibit actions by increasing friction.
Thanks to AI’s learning curve, the content we consume will very gradually become immersive, haptic and tactile.
Reality as we knew it will be over.
Foregone.
Ignored.
Little by little, AI will lock us all up with our very own consent.
The boiling frog phenomenon
It has happened before.
“New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing that they’ve built—they’ve built their own prison—and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have—having been lobotomized—the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made or even to see it as a prison.”**
The computing power that will allow AI to fully lure us away from reality, however, is not here yet.
As you know, AI consumes prodigious amounts of energy and processing power.
Moore’s law will do its thing: computing power 2exes every two years.
Stay tuned.
“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”***
* I might be wrong but I think these concepts were coined by Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein.
** Quote from the film “My dinner with Andre” (1981), Directed by Louis Malle.
*** This quote usually attributed to Marshall McLuhan is not his (in its entirety at least). Source: https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/2013/04/01/we-shape-our-tools-and-thereafter-our-tools-shape-us/
